Rules Project: Encouraging Contributions

Problem description: 'The SpamAssassin committers are not spending much time writing rules. Attempts to recruit people to become committers to write rules have been somewhat unsuccessful. We could always use more committers and contributors; what can we do to encourage more contribution?'

Here's some ideas.

Sandboxes

Mass-checking

LorenWilton noted 'A big part (perhaps the biggest part) of rules development is the mass check. Most anyone can develop a rule on their home system and see how they *think* it works. Some few (but not many) people can do a mass-check on their home system and see how it *really* works - *for them*. As proposed, this rules project doesn't address the most important part of a rules project - some way to check the rules against a fairly large corpus.'

Nightly Mass-Checks

We currently have the NightlyMassCheck systems which do this, but turnaround time is too slow for most rule developers.

It does however offer the following good aspects:

info on how a new rule compares to the full *existing* ruleset

overlaps between rules, using "hit-frequencies -o"

collated results across all users' corpora, which can be broken down to view each user separately or all together

checked rules and their results are kept in a version-control history, so benefits of VC are available

ongoing visibility of hit-rates of the existing ruleset, against fresh corpora